Merve Emre
Merve Emre is an associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Bookforum, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Baffler, n+1, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is senior humanities editor.
3 Books Written
Literature departments are staffed by, and tend to be focused on turning out, “good” readers—attentive to nuance, aware of history, interested in literary texts as self-contained works. But the vast majority of readers are, to use Merve Emre’s tongue-in-cheek term, “bad” readers. They read fiction and poetry to be moved, distracted, instructed, improved, engaged as citizens. How should we think ab
The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing
by Merve Emre
Rating: 3.3 ⭐
An unprecedented history of the personality test conceived a century ago by a mother and her daughter—fiction writers with no formal training in psychology—and how it insinuated itself into our boardrooms, classrooms, and beyond The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It is used regularly by Fortune 500 companies, universities, hospital
What can technology do for feminism?Almost fifty years ago, Shulamith Firestone imagined it could liberate women from the work of reproduction—so long as it was conceived as part of a cultural revolution. This collection casts a critical eye on the promises and the perils, asking not just whether an emancipatory feminism is possible today, but also what it might look like.